Technische Universität München Faculty of Civil, Geo and Environmental Engineering Department of Cartography Prof. Dr.-Ing. Liqiu Meng Procedural 3D modeling and visualization of geotypical Bavarian rural buildings in Esri CityEngine software Ieva Dobraja Master’s Thesis Submitted: January, 2015 Study Program: Cartography (Master) Supervisors: Dr.-Ing. Mathias Jahnke (TUM) Dr.-Ing. Özgür Ertac (Esri Deutschland GmbH) Cooperation: ESRI Deutschland GmbH 2015 Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that the thesis submitted is my own unaided work. All direct or indirect sources used are acknowledged as references. This paper was not previously presented to another examination board and has not been published. Place and date (Signature) Abstract and Key Words Abstract The aim of the Master’s Thesis “Procedural 3D modeling and visualization of geotypical Bavarian rural buildings in Esri CityEngine software” is to establish a 3D model library for rural Bavarian buildings and to create a 3D model of geotypical buildings for the case study area. The purpose of this thesis is to test if the software CityEngine, which is based on procedural modeling and mainly used for creating a 3D content of urban areas, can be applied for the 3D modeling of rural areas. As the area of interest with typical Bavarian buildings chosen for this thesis was Seefeld, a municipality in the district of Starnberg, located southwest of Munich. It lies on the northern coast of the Pilsen Lake. The task of the thesis is to create a 3D model of geotypical Bavarian rural buildings for the case study area by using procedural modeling. This task includes four main steps. The first step is the collection of all necessary data and attributes of buildings to create a database for modeling. This step includes also the photo collection of typical façade textures. The second step is to generate CGA rule file. The next step is the creation of the 3D model in Esri CityEngine software, using the rule files created. At the end, the final results of the 3D model generated are published as CityEngine WebScene. The final result is a procedurally generated 3D model of the case study area. Key Words 3D modeling, Procedural modeling, CityEngine, CGA, rule file, WebScene, Bavarian rural buildings i Table of Contents Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. i Key Words ......................................................................................................................................... i Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ ii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................................... vi Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................ vii 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Motivation ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Objectives .......................................................................................................................... 1 1.3 Structure of the Thesis ....................................................................................................... 1 2 Fundamentals and Applications of 3D Modeling ..................................................................... 3 2.1 Related Work ..................................................................................................................... 3 2.2 Definition of 3D modeling ................................................................................................ 8 2.3 Procedural 3D modeling .................................................................................................... 8 2.4 Esri CityEngine as a tool for procedural 3D modeling ................................................... 10 3 Case Study Area ...................................................................................................................... 15 3.1 Description of the case study area ................................................................................... 15 3.2 Description of necessary data .......................................................................................... 19 4 Data Processing ....................................................................................................................... 22 4.1 Data preparation before import into Esri CityEngine ...................................................... 22 4.2 Data import into CityEngine ............................................................................................ 27 4.3 Steps of procedural modeling using CityEngine ............................................................. 28 4.4 Problems during the modeling process ............................................................................ 30 5 Results ..................................................................................................................................... 37 6 Summary ................................................................................................................................. 40 6.1 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 40 6.2 Problem overview ............................................................................................................ 40 6.3 Future work ...................................................................................................................... 41 7 References ............................................................................................................................... 42 ii Table of Contents Appendix ........................................................................................................................................ 45 Appendix A: Rule file for buildings ........................................................................................... 46 iii List of Figures List of Figures Figure 1-1: Structure of the thesis .................................................................................................... 1 Figure 2-1: Image-Based Modeling and Rendering (IBMR) (Luan et al. 2008) ............................. 4 Figure 2-2: The pipeline of the city creation tool. The dark boxes show the results and data structures of the tools in the white rectangles (Parish & Müller 2001) ............................................ 5 Figure 2-3: The scope of the shape (Müller et al. 2006) .................................................................. 5 Figure 2-4: A typical workflow of CityEngine (Watson et al. 2008)............................................... 6 Figure 2-5: Principle of the procedural modeling (Radies 2013a) ................................................... 7 Figure 2-6: 2D zoning plan (Radies 2013a) ..................................................................................... 7 Figure 2-7: 3D zoning plan (Radies 2013a) ..................................................................................... 8 Figure 2-8: Principles of the procedural modeling (Schubiger 2012) ............................................. 9 Figure 2-9: Efficiency of a procedural modeling in comparison with a manual modeling (Schubiger 2012) ................................................................................................................................................. 9 Figure 2-10: Overview of import and export data formats in the CityEngine software (Radies 2013b) ............................................................................................................................................. 10 Figure 2-11: The CityEngine user interface (Esri 2014b) .............................................................. 11 Figure 2-12: Example of 2D data (Esri n.d.(a)) ............................................................................. 12 Figure 2-13: A graphical representation of a rule file in CityEngine ............................................. 13 Figure 2-14: Application possibilities of 3D city models created in CityEngine (Schubiger 2012) ........................................................................................................................................................ 13 Figure 2-15: Creation steps of a 3D city model in the CityEngine software (Esri n.d.(b)) ........... 14 Figure 3-1: Location of Seefeld (Google 2014) ............................................................................. 15 Figure 3-2: Case study area ............................................................................................................ 16 Figure 3-3: Seefeld Palace (Seefeld24.de 2000) ............................................................................ 17 Figure 3-4: Church in Seefeld (Gemeinde Seefeld 2012) .............................................................. 17 Figure 3-5: Town hall of Seefeld ..................................................................................................